Recovery day runs on rails. Pool, bikes, stretching in a line. In the shallow end, Polášek and Novotný find the day’s war, whether watching tape tonight is preparation or bad luck.
Šíma waits until the cooldown. “The GPS flagged you. Eleven kilometers yesterday, on foot, on a rest day.”
“Walking is rest.”
“Eleven kilometers isn’t walking, it’s emigration.” He pulls his towel around his neck. “Where does a man even walk to, eleven kilometers, in a city he doesn’t know?”
“I know the city fine.” It’s out before I check it. Šíma looks at me with great patience, the way he looks at a lock he plans to come back for.
“The pool,” I say. “I’m getting back in the pool.”
“You’ve been in the pool.”
“Thoroughness.”
I eat the ragù that night standing at the minibar with a coffee spoon, Novotný out with some of the guys. Cold, straight from the container. It doesn’t matter. I eat all of it. Then I stand there a while, holding the empty container. I wash it in the bathroom sink with hotel shampoo, which is a crime with two victims, and dry it with a towel I’ll have to fold so housekeeping doesn’t ask questions.
I tell myself the container needs returning tonight, on foot. Four blocks of cardio and manners.
The filing system stamps it. Manners. The system and I both know better, and neither of us says so.
He opens the door in his old Napoli training shirt and doesn’t look surprised, which is worse than him being surprised. The shirt is soft at the collar and too loose on one shoulder, the old blue faded almost grey. His dark hair is pushed back and failing. His eyes are not. They are wide awake, deep blue and absolutely done accepting the smaller version of anything.
“You ate it.” He raises an eyebrow in question.
“With a coffee spoon.”
“That’s disrespectful to the sauce.”
“The sauce survived. The spoon didn’t.” I hold out the container. “It’s washed.”
“How?”
“You don’t want the answer.”
He watches me for a long time, and I can tell he’s deciding whether to let me in. Behind him, the kitchen is dark. The apartment holds one kind of quiet, the kind with nobody else in it.
“Davide isn’t here,” he says. “That is not a loophole.”
“I know.”
“Do you? Because you were always very good at finding doors that opened the wrong way.”
I hold the container between us, stupid and clean and not enough for anything. “I didn’t come for a loophole.”
This is true and not true, which is how the worst answers earn their paperwork. A dark hallway is still a hallway. A closed apartment is still the old route wearing clean shoes. But I am here with no bed waiting in Rome and no exit timed before sunrise, and for tonight that has to matter.
“You came at nine at night.” He pauses. “With a clean container.”
“Yes.”
He looks at me for long enough that the stair light behind me times out. Neither of us moves to wake it.
“It isn’t noon,” he says. “I told you noon.”
“I know.”
“Outside. At a table. Where people can see your face. This is not that. And if I let you through this door, it still won’t be that.”